Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been taking rhetorical fire for his poor college grades. The Republican presidential candidate was — by his own account and, increasingly, his opponents’ — a mediocre student.

“I struggled with [college]. I fully admit that,” he told Liberty University students in September.

Perry’s grades ranged from an F in organic chemistry to an A in world military systems. He graduated from Texas A&M University with a 2.5 grade point average in 1972, with a bachelor’s degree in animal science.

Hundreds of scientific studies over the past half-century show a surprisingly weak correlation between college grades and future success.

So Perry’s lackluster college performance prompts the question: Do our elected leaders’ college grades matter?

Not surprisingly, left-wing political analysts have seized on Perry’s college performance as a sign of his unfitness for office.

Huffington Post obtained and published Perry’s transcripts under the headline, “Rick Perry’s College Transcript: A lot of C’s and D’s.”

After Perry’s speech, The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd labeled Republicans the “‘How great is it to be stupid?’ party” and accused them of “perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency.”

But both Republican and Democratic presidents and presidential aspirants have struggled to make the grade. Ronald Reagan was an indifferent student at Eureka College. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) graduated from the Naval Academy in the bottom 1 percent of his class. It’s well-known that George W. Bush preferred socializing to studying at Yale and then Harvard Business School.

On the Democratic side, both Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) got worse grades than the man who later defeated them in their presidential bids.

Gore, the global warming alarmist, managed only a D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature) and a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 at Harvard. He later dropped out after struggling at Vanderbilt Law School.

Then there’s Vice President Joe Biden. Biden’s initial campaign for president, in 1988, was dogged by revelations of plagiarism, including of a law review article for a paper he had written in law school.

When Biden finally released his college transcripts, they revealed, according to The New York Times, “relatively poor grades in college and law school, mixed evaluations from teachers and details of the plagiarism.” Biden attended the University of Delaware as an undergraduate, and then Syracuse University Law School, where he graduated 76th in a class of 85.

What about President Barack Obama’s grades? We don’t know. The schools he attended — Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard — haven’t released them.

Yet the record of college achievement might not have mattered. A 1965 analysis, “The relationship between college grades and adult achievement,” reviewed 46 major studies. It concluded that the evidence “strongly suggests that college grades bear little or no relationship to any measures of adult accomplishment.”

A 1984 meta-analysis of 108 studies on the correlation between grades and success in a wide variety of fields also found results that, the authors concluded, “may be somewhat discouraging to those who place a great deal of importance on the predictive value of grades.”

More recent studies have drawn similar conclusions — including a 2004 study that found “grade point average had little impact on earnings” for college graduates in the three years following graduation.

So if grades don’t predict success, what does?

One predictor of success undervalued until recently is emotional intelligence — which covers qualities including temperament, self-awareness, initiative, optimism, impulse control and the ability to listen. Many of the previously mentioned mediocre students have these qualities in abundance.

Perry’s college performance fits the left’s image of conservatives as know-nothing, anti-intellectuals who wear ignorance as a badge of honor. But context is important. Perry attended a small, rural high school, in one of the least-educated counties in the country. He was probably ill-prepared for college.

Yes, his transcript may include a couple of D’s and an F. But his résumé also reveals an impressive record of management and leadership that includes more than a decade as governor of the second-largest state, as well as stints as lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner and a state legislator for more than 25 years.

The Dallas Morning News named Perry one of the 10 most effective members of the Texas Legislature during his time as member of the Texas House. He also spent time as a farmer — and five years in the Air Force, raising to the rank of captain.

None of this means grades are irrelevant. (Who wouldn’t like to take a peek at the president’s economics grades?) But it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Maureen Dowd may bemoan a presidential candidate who “stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.” But many voters will most likely regard a perspective leader’s early academic troubles as an irrelevance at worst — and perhaps even an asset.

After all, some people may find comfort in the idea of our political leaders as brilliant super-humans predestined for greatness in everything they do. But if our most successful leaders sometimes experience academic difficulty early in life, it suggests that they also have developed admirable qualities, like fortitude, resiliency — and maybe even some humility.

Gary Bauer served as undersecretary of education in the Reagan administration. He is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.